Friday, May 2, 2014

Hobby Progress/KR Review

I preach the word of Carl.

This week has been quite the toasty one, despite my
workspace having an identical atmosphere to an easy bake oven I did manage to
get some hobby time in this week. As you can see by my highly advanced project
tracking system I finished all of D’s guard commissions for the month. With that out of the way I
have had more time to work on my sentinels I decided the best way to go on this
project was to break everything down into squads of three. Not counting basing
I have managed to clear six of them since Monday, after getting my jungle funge
layering system down its gotten a lot easier to crank these guys out, basing is
still going to be a bit of a chore, but as a whole they have been coming out
pretty consistently painted.

My army grows.

One of the first ones I did up out of the set.

I heard you like sentinels...

Aaannndddd more sentinels.

Random sniper, why not.

Oh yeah, did I mention I finally broke down and bought some
soft blue foam, and if I didn’t upgrade my kit soon I would have keep running
with my old set up (battle damaged army sabol bag filled with packing peanuts,
old large GW figure case) add to that I have been doing hobby demos and taking
pictures for the Escalation league over at Legends, I basically looked like a Sherpa
every time I went to the shop. So I decided I try there auto fill app for my
guard stuff and picked up a single case with no bag. Let me start by saying
there are plenty of reviews for KR floating around out there that go into great
detail about their product, this will not be one of those, as a matter of fact
“just plain awesome” pretty much sums up my experience with KR so far,
everything about this product is plain and functional with little extra
ornamentation or frill and I mean that in the most positive manner. I have seen
other more expensive options that simply add nothing more than extra flair and
decide its worth double the price, KR on the other hand doesn’t bother with
overly specialized options, they make a simple highly modular product that is
designed to fit your needs and there has yet to be an issue with my purchase
that really stands out as a negative, I do kind of wish they had a tray that
was half troop half heavy weapons squad ( as you can see above I found a work
around) but other than that everything seems well designed and optimized. You
can cram a lot into a single case and not just troops (though I hear you can
cram over 200 into a single hard case) I managed to get two troop choices
(about 60 pieces of infantry) plus armor and HQ’s into one case, and there was
no wiggle and no loose minis jangling around during transit.

I cut plugs in half so I could put more infantry in the empty slots.

For comparison here’s a few shots of the cores for my other
bags (SABOL and GW) GW’s foam comes closest, but it’s still a far cry from the
quality and softness of KR’s trays, GW’s trays are soft but much more dense and
springy, with a little give, KR by comparison is quite soft and malleable
almost plush to the touch with enough density to keep everything in place, but
also has enough give to make sure that piece that’s just a little too wide can
be made to fit without fear of damage.

Sabol sad to say represents the old school, pick n pluck was
the norm 7-8 years ago, but now feels quite dated (KR does offer pick n pluck
style trays, which do still have their uses) Compared with the more modern
purpose cut foam trays from companies like KR and Battlefoam this stuff just doesn’t
stack up. The foam itself has very little give and does not feel that far
removed from those little bits you used to get in the GW metal single packs.
Still though I use it for over flow and I will never get rid of my army carrier
bag (It has far too much character to throw out, and it doubles as a cooler) So
sadly I can no longer recommend them, or most of their product line, they do
still make a quality and consistant product, but there are better evenly
priced options out there now.

That’s it, for now anyways, I plan to get another batch of
sentinels done up tonight and maybe another sniper or medic, but for the most
part that’s all my hobby progress for this week. Before I sign off though, a
quick shout out for the stuff of legends podcast. This Sunday we will be
recording episode 13, we’ll be going over escalation news, some of the 6.1ed
stuff that’s been bubbling up lately, and I review my first issue of WD
visions. You can check out all the previous episodes of TSoL here.

These guys are all mine, they started life as an apoc project, but with the addition of allies in 6th I started to play around with the idea of running a massive walker army, just for fun. In total I have 26, not counting the basing work I am about half way done (we have an apoc game at the shop coming up) So hopefully ill get everything done this month.